How did the pioneers clear the land?
- Thread starter Yoga Face
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Hopefully you are not walking past a grove of notched trees when they decide to fall like dominoes. All of these neat tricks are just that tricks. It better to fall the tree when you're read to do it and control it, hopefully when no one else is walking nearby.
Interesting
I was waiting for Old Jones to offer his insight
I was unaware that the Lachine rapids made Toronto inaccessible by Ocean going boats
All the goods had to be portaged which would have created income for some immigrants
However, this would not stop the transportation of logs as they could float over the rapids to be picked up downstream
I still wonder if the better hardwood trees would have made it to England this way and provided income to the settlers
The trees were certainly used locally but the bigger market would have been Europe as they had cut down most of their trees over the centuries
As you state, getting the trees to market was a huge problem for a farmer unless he lived by a huge stream or nearer to the lake
Dragging the trees any distance would have been very hard. They would have used a team but I wonder how they did it exactly
Maybe wait until winter when the land is hard and no rain to bog you down
As you state, I suspect this was a trade on its own and the farmers never hauled the trees and which gave them much needed financial relief, i suspect
As for how they burned the trees they did not want, as well as the stumps, I speculate on this in post 40
The fire does the work of getting rid of the treas, unless you have a more useful idea, like building a cabin, or making money selling them (but as you say, the transport's the bitch). You leave the stumps until planting and harvesting for your own survival doesn't take all your time. The ones that are really in the way, you probably try to minimize with the cheapest resources—you pile wood on the stump and burn it.
The only way charcoal is cheap is if you make it yourself, or do a deal with an itinerant charcoal burner to give you some in exchange for the wood he needs. He's only going to 'happen by' if he can get his product out to market. As a man with horses can make an easier living faster than charcoal burning, he's either shipping by water right from your property, or there's already a road and decently cheap teamsters doing decent business nearby. Although excess logs often went into road building, that suggests your property's beyond the stump-clogged phase already.
Eventually stump removal does get done, and horse-powered stump-pulling machines are part of any decent antique equipment collection or display. If you have the labour and somewhat pricey tools—chains, pulleys and rope, saws, shovels and axes you can keep sharp in the dirt, a guy can DIY a lot of stumps with sheer-legs and block and tackle, but just as to-day. a specialist contractor with the equipment is often a better plan. If you have the money.
What we XXIC guys forget is that the only way to do stuff fast in pioneer times was to put more men and horses to work on it, and both were scarce in the new land. Unless you were someone with means and money and could buy help, you'd long ago gotten used to the fact that this new land of yours was a lifetime project that your children would be seeing through after you were gone. For people wgo might spend a whole year without needing cash money, stuff happened slow.
Just as today; you do what you can the best you can. What you can't do, you cope with.
Logs pile up in rapids and create jams, so very early on folks built chutes and flumes to carry them past. I wouldn't know if there were any at Lachine, but there definitely were at Ottawa to bypass the Chaudiere, and riding the timber rafts was a diversion offered to visiting dignitaries. While there were all sorts of local mills and local demand all over Ontario, I've not come across anything I recall about a serious timber trade with Britain except the northern one.
Until the arrival of serious heavy machinery after WWII the woods were still harvested in much the way the pioneers did, and as you described, by horses and teamsters hauling single logs over the snow (much easier than in summer) to the ice to wait for the Spring Drive. Growing up in Ottawa I couldn't help nut be aware that every spring the River by the EB Eddy plant across from Parliament Hill would clog and fill with logbooms that slowly emptied into the mill all year long. Until next spring's drive. Of course by then the industry was down to pulpwood fior tooilet paper and the days of the heavy squared timber rafts for the British Navy (and rioting Raftsmen) were long past.
Girdling and its various refinements is a great handsfree method of felling—which matters a lot if he has the only two available hands 'cause she's making soap and bread and feeding the baby. But it's very slow, and if you need to put root veggies up to get thru winter and stuff to live on now you need to get a good few trees down and outta your way fast. Of course you didn't pick the middle of a dense forest to settle, but even a relatively clear slope near the water would put you to a lotta hard, immediate work with a saw and axe, felling the tree, and more to the point getting all the damn branches outta the way. And so you plan on having your buddy Fire do a whole lot of the work. But the hurry up stuff, so you have a farmable patch, the guys bringing the big stuff can land it and you have room to start housebuilding is all yours.
Ain't it amazing—and kinda heartwarming—how fast a thread can grow when it's about dull old history and our ancestors!
Removing stumps makes no sense to me
After all that work now you now got to drag them somewhere and the end result is a hole in the ground and a trench where you dragged the stump
Allow them to rot then turn into fertilizer over 20-30 years or whatever .
You can speed this process with a charcoal or pitch induced smolder of the stump
If you are going to burn some wood anyways you might as well pile it onto a stump and kill two birds with one stone
Biological warfare might have been termites or worm bores but I doubt they used this tactic
As far as labor goes, I wonder how important escaped slaves were as they came up here for freedom and would have been a very cheap and hard working labor force
There is also the Irish escaping the great potato famine but not until 1840
We told them a bunch of lies to get them over here then had them die building the canals - a dark past of Canada when we were still British
The Lachine Canal was built in the early 19th century to by pass the rapids and deepened and powered later to make it open to larger heavier ships. The opening of the St Lawrence Seaway in the late 50's was the next step and the system that made the the canal outdated
Considering a team of large horse can pull over 5000 pounds it wouldn't be much work to pull a prepared stump especially if you involve the use of a simple lever, block and tackle. or windlass.
Waiting 20-30 years is almost a lifetime back then.
Actually the puritans told the Irish and Scots they'd give them free land, but the catch was that the free land was on the frontier between the settlements and the indian nations, THANKS.
Yes
But it is the way that makes the most sense
Remove the stump and you got a hole in the ground
Let it rot into fertilizer
As each year goes by the land becomes worth more as more settlers arrive and the land is that much nearer to being cleared of stumps so you can sell or hold for your children
Until then you had to portage everything going to Europe or coming from Europe
Cutting the trees into boards at Toronto then sailing them to the rapids then portaging around the rapids to waiting ocean going vessels seems doable
Needless to say it depends upon where they were - the boreal forest is one thing clearing land in Southern Ontario or even earlier along the East Coast of the U.S. is another.
A girdled deciduous tree will die quite rapidly if it is leafed out.
I agree that there must have been practical problems, however, I can only tell you that historically in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the first concern was to get a crop in to feed yourself they girdled all or almost all in the area they wanted to plant.
If the tree you're pulling is a conifer the hole is very shallow and can be turned into something useful like a midden. Not all stumps were removed. Cutting them close to the ground and pile dirt from other holes or mounds was another way. It must have been the way to go because the cut a tow away was the way they used. They were pretty smart when developing good ways to do manual labour.
Horses have greater "acceleration" and can pull more rapidly. Oxen have greater endurance and can pull heavier loads. Hence oxen are more suitable for heavy tasks such as plowing in wet, heavy or clayey soil or breaking sod. So in this case if you want a jerk on the stump - horses, if you want greater long term pulling on the stump - oxen.
Toronto/York may have been a bad choice for a lumber mill for export business and more suitable for local consumption. If you can't carry the load you don't portage it. You really can't efficiently carry/hump lumber overland. When you transport cut lumber you have less of a choice of what you can do with it at the other and just as much of a chance of damage .It has to be pre-sold before shipping.Transport timber and your choices are numerous and damage can be dealt with by selective cutting.
Cant see the problem here
You would be wary of a notched tree and not eat your lunch under it nor plant crops near it
It is well marked for all those who are trespassing
Saving labor ideas would be the most valuable tool you have although i do not know if this idea was used but i cannot see why other then you would not have the same clean cut as if you felled it but if you plan to burn the tree a clean cut would not matter
The size of the notch to do what you ask it to do is already quite large so why not cut the tree down under controlled conditions and not have to return later to harvest the tree. You require two round trips to do it your way, cut, let fall, and harvest, but one round trip to do it the simpler way of cut and harvest.
Evolution says stumps do not rot fast, nor do they succumb to termites; that's why trees don't suddenly fall down because the roots rotted or were eaten, and a reason for making fences outta them. You can still see two hundred year old stump fences that are sound.
After awhile, once you're past working with hoes, you get real tired of all the wasted space they take, and the extra work of going around and past them to plough. Turning a team is hard, and doing it poorly reduces your yield. It isn't so much the stump itself, which is only a few feet across, but the fact that it widens into roots that spread a good deal and catch the plough, which endangers you, and the team as well as the valuable and hard to replace harness. So eventually this or that stump gets to the top of the pioneers TDL. Maybe a whole bunch of 'em to make a worthwhile job to hire out.
Like any and all of this there isn't just one universal answer for everywhere and always. Some trees you gotta deal with fast, and some stumps too—like where you're going to put your cabin for the first winter—and some you can leave for a long time, like the big one on the slope leading down to the lake, where the grandkids eventually will play dolls. In between you dp what you can when you need to as fast as circumstances allow, using any and all methods you've invented or heard of.
Just like today.
I am assuming the portage is done on a maintained road and horses and wagons would do the carrying
You would not carry anything by hand as the land is fairly flat around the rapids and available to horses (unlike the portage around the FALLS)
Lifting the wood with the tripod method, I presume they used, at both ends of the portage would stop damage and not be overly expensive as labor is cheap
Cut boards would be extremely valuable in Europe as they have cut down their trees over the years esp trees for masts and supports beams for huge buildings
but the rapids might have prevented such huge timber from being transported unless the tree was floated
it is fun to speculate
